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For the Heirs to Holmes, a Tangled Web

For a 123-year-old detective, Sherlock Holmes is a surprisingly reliable earner.

Though readers were not always informed of his compensation for, say, uncovering the truth of the Red-Headed League or bringing the Hound of the Baskervilles to heel, Holmes remains a valuable literary property.

His adventures in books, plays, television shows and movies continue to pay dividends for the heirs of his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes’s latest appearance on film, directed by Guy Ritchie, has sold more than $311 million in tickets worldwide, and on Sunday won a Golden Globe award for its star, Robert Downey Jr.

At his age, Holmes would logically seem to have entered the public domain. But not only is the character still under copyright in the United States, for nearly 80 years he has also been caught in a web of ownership issues so tangled that Professor Moriarty wouldn’t have wished them upon him.

“It is,” said Jon Lellenberg, the American literary agent for the Arthur Conan Doyle estate, “enough to make lawyers’ eyes roll up in their heads. Even British lawyers.”

After the death of Conan Doyle in 1930, the guardianship of his literary properties was handed down through the three children he had with his second wife, Jean. Their son Denis helped usher Holmes into screen appearances both enduring (the Basil Rathbone films) and ephemeral (a 1954 television series starring Ronald Howard) before his death in 1955. The estate then passed to a younger son, Adrian, who died in 1970, and then to a daughter, also named Jean.

Denis’s widow, Nina, fought for control of the properties and won, purchasing the characters and establishing Baskervilles Investments Ltd., which fell into financial disarray. The Royal Bank of Scotland took receivership of the company and in 1976 sold the Conan Doyle rights; they came under the management of an American producer, Sheldon Reynolds, who made the 1954 “Sherlock Holmes” television series.

Mr. Reynolds did not have much time to exploit the acquisition. In 1980 Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’s other works entered the public domain in Britain. In America the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976 gave an author or his heirs a chance to recapture lost rights; Conan Doyle’s daughter, Jean, did so in 1981.

Jean Conan Doyle, a retired air commandant in the Women’s Royal Air Force, was said to be fiercely loyal to her father’s literary vision, but she seemed to have a whimsical side too. She permitted the licensing of his characters for offbeat films like “Young Sherlock Holmes” (which imagines Holmes and Watson as teenagers) and “Without A Clue” (in which a bumbling Holmes is a patsy employed by a genius Watson).

At her death in 1997, Jean Conan Doyle bequeathed her father’s copyrights to the Royal National Institute of Blind People. The institute sold the rights back to the Doyle heirs, who transferred them into a family-owned company.

In recent years the estate has licensed the characters for mystery collections with Christmas themes (“Holmes for the Holidays”) and supernatural overtones (“Ghosts in Baker Street”). Mr. Lellenberg said a volume of vampire-theme Holmes stories was also being considered.

“Vampires are all the rage these days,” he said. “There’s no end.”

As Holmes has endured, so have challenges over his ownership. In court cases that started in the late 1990s, Andrea Plunket, the ex-wife of Mr. Reynolds, the producer, filed suits against the Conan Doyle estate and other companies, saying they violated her rights to the characters. Her family had financed the purchase of the Conan Doyle properties from the Royal Bank of Scotland, and after she divorced her husband (and became the companion of the socialite Claus von Bülow), she said those rights were hers.

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled against Ms. Plunket, and her attempt to trademark the Sherlock Holmes name was denied. But in a telephone interview, she said she was the administrator of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate, and that when Jean Conan Doyle’s advisers served Ms. Plunket’s family with a notice of copyright termination, they sent it to a non-existent address.

Ms. Plunket, who now operates a bed-and-breakfast in Livingston Manor, N.Y., said that Mr. Lellenberg and his colleagues were the aggressors. “He has one huge advantage,” she said, “which is the name Conan Doyle, which he brandishes, of course.”

Photo

Jude Law as Dr. John Watson.Credit
Warner Brothers Pictures

Ms. Plunket said that she had a limited involvement in the making of Mr. Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” film, and that she spoke frequently with its producers and visited its set. “Nobody asked me for my advice,” she said “They didn’t say, ‘Oh, well, Mrs. Plunket, tell us who you want to play Sherlock Holmes.’ I had no legal right.”

Mr. Lellenberg said Ms. Plunket may still own derivative properties created by Mr. Reynolds, like a Sherlock Holmes series for Polish television. Also, he said, “The studios are vulnerable to harassment, to nuisances, and some people they pay off just to get them out of their way. I don’t know if they did that in this case.”

(A spokeswoman for Warner Brothers, which released Mr. Ritchie’s film, said it had entered into agreements with Mr. Lellenberg’s clients and Ms. Plunket for the movie, but declined to specify the details.)

Mr. Lellenberg said that Sherlock Holmes remains under copyright protection in the United States through 2023, and that any new properties involving the detective “definitely should” be licensed by the Conan Doyle estate. Asked about a recent Red Bull television commercial that features a cartoon Holmes and Watson, Mr. Lellenberg said he had not seen it. “Very interesting,” he said. “News to me.”

The estate remains mum about its plans for the time Sherlock Holmes falls into the American public domain, or whether it might try to extend the copyrights. But Mr. Lellenberg said the group pays careful attention to the management of other venerable pop-cultural properties: the Walt Disney Company, which is preparing to celebrate the 82nd birthday of Mickey Mouse, has “always been at the leading edge” of intellectual property law, he said. And he noted that the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the adventure writer who created Tarzan and John Carter of Mars (each 98), has “generally been the quickest off the mark to ensure and enhance protection for its works and characters.”

There are now nine surviving Conan Doyle heirs, and none is a direct descendant of the author. But Mr. Lellenberg said they all understood the obligation that Holmes represented for their family, particularly for Jean Conan Doyle, who was 17 when her father died.

“She had been old enough to know him well,” Mr. Lellenberg said, “and remembered him writing the last set of stories and reading them to her and her brothers and mother. She also knew the problems of managing an extremely popular literary character. She said that Sherlock Holmes was the Conan Doyle family curse.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 19, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: For the Heirs To Holmes, A Tangled Web. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe